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FTC v. Meta: the antitrust battle’s final day

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Judge wonders if he should bother worrying about ‘amorphous’ quality measures.

Hemphill argues that Meta has reduced overall market output for consumers with its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, because consumers believe it’s reduced the quality of the services even if they’ve added users. But “users is a real concrete metric,” where quality is harder to quantify, Boasberg says, “so why shouldn’t we be focused on that?” Hemphill concedes it’s harder to measure, but says quality is an important aspect of the overall health of the market.

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